I have been informed that I would be in violation of the agreement of the witness protection program if I was to divulge such information at this time. 
More or less. I lack the perma-day-glo-orange tan that seems to come with territory though. 
I am a shame to my family.
I’ve got a friend, haven’t seen him in years, though, that was/is a bookie with all the customary connections.
He decided to retire from bookmaking, and hire a woman to come and teach him to play the piano. He started studying comedy - Henny Youngman especially, and his plan was to start a second career as a nightclub entertainer. Last I heard, his act was really good, and he was booking shows at all the major Boston comedy clubs.
Here’s the kicker. When the statute of limitations expires, he wants me to help him write his autobiography.
Does anyone know the statute of limitations on bookmaking and racketeering?
I’ve got a close friend who’s father was beneficiary of a life insurance policy on a guy he invested some money with (about $80K IIRC). The guy ended up running off with the money (millions in total - there were many investors), and shortly thereafter turned up dead (“heart attack”). I think my friends dad collected about $250K in “insurance” money. The same guy (my friends dad), around the same time - maybe a year later (this was 20 years ago), “won the lottery” and collected another $500K (after taxes).
This same family had to change the spelling of their family name a couple generations ago because “someone” from “the old country” had been systematically hunting down and executing every single person with their name. No kidding. They changed one letter so now their name is “French” instead of “Italian”.
When I was in college, I drove a delivery truck for a “family owned” distributorship in Lynn, Mass. I delivered VeryFine juice, cigarettes, tampons, batteries, candy, and other sundry items. Occassionally, I also delivered small cardboard boxes labeled “T-Sirt Bags” that definitely did not contain T-Shirt Bags.
Also when I was in college, my best friend was a bartender for a little waterfront tavern in Salem. We were thinking about opening a tavern of our own. My friend’s boss offered to stake us and get us started. I thought that was great, but my buddy said it wasn’t a good idea. He explained that Dennis (his boss) was offering two things: a loan, and a “favor”. After the loan was paid back, we’d still owe him the “favor”. That guy (my buddy’s boss) turned up dead a couple years later. He’d been shot in the face a few times.
What else…
Whitey Bulger used to hitch rides around Charlestown on the back of my uncle’s truck. He’d just jump up on the rear bumper and ride along for a few blocks till he got where he was going. My buddy with the “lucky” dad knew all about this method of city transportation, too. I’m actually surprised it’s never turned up in a mob movie. Maybe it’s just a Boston goombah thing.
I’m sure there’s more, but I can’t think of anything right now.
I went to junior high in Putnam County, NY. There was one kid who exuded “Italian-American businessman” but in miniature; I wouldn’t be surprised if he was related to some made-man or another.
Can’t tell from just a plane flight, but this was the Guido-est of the Guidoes I’ve ever seen:
– Middle aged bald guy with an earring and a cane.
– Thick Brooklyn accent.
– Buying drinks for everyone near him (as I had to drive home I ignored him when he was doing this.)
– When I spilt ice next to him and was trying to clean it up, he thought I was trying to clean up his leg and he said “no problem, you’re a good kid” (I’m 33.)
He was flying into Orlando to see if the VA would adjust his pension as he was on disability. Now, that made sense at the time, it explains the cane. But who would take a plane flight FROM New York TO Orlando for a governmental bureaucracy thing? “Adjust my pension”, indeed.
I once bought crystal meth from Tony Spilotros son. He was a good guy. Needless to say we all knew what would happen if some of pops boys showed up. Having grown up in Vegas that movie Casino was really just a glorification of what those boys did. I saw some of the bloodstains they left behind . Very serious indeed.
Those kids. I hope they turn out allright .
I’ve met quite a few racketeering /drug dealing playas in the world of hip-hop over the years. I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone connected to the Italian mob, though.
Yeah–my uncle, back when he was an exec with a taxicab company in Chicago, allegedly did some biz with the Chi-town mob. (Cab companies are great for money laundering–they handle a lot of cash, and they provide services rather than goods, which makes them harder to audit effectively.) Don’t know if it was true & don’t really want to …
Nope, your great-uncle. You (in the generic sense) can have, and you (in the specific sense, Diosa) indeed do have second cousins, but not second uncles or aunts.
My dad plays clarinet and sax, and many of his gigs have entailed performing at mobbed-up establishments. Dad also taught school for many years. At one point, a new superintendent took over in the district and quickly gained the antipathy of most of the teachers. One night, Dad was playing at the restaurant where he worked regularly for about a decade, and got to talking about the superintendent with one of the regular customers. Sam told Dad that “if you ever want this guy’s house to burn down, just say the word, and I’ll see it happens.”
When I was in college, I knew Joe, who was on the school baseball team. He wasn’t a great friend, but I occasionally ended up at his table in the dining hall. On one such night, he asked me (imagine stereotypical dumb-Italian-youth voice): “What would you do if your dad was in the Mafia, and could be killed at any moment?” Before I could respond, Vinny (who despite his name was not of any Italian descent AFAIK) burst out with: “Why, Joe, is your dad in the Mafia?” Joe just got a shit-eating grin on his face.
However, I had seen Joe’s father a couple of times, and would be shocked if Benny wasn’t “connected”. A story I heard (third-hand, but from primary and secondary sources I had no reason to doubt) was that Benny had shown up at the diamond during baseball practice in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac or Lincoln. He had gotten out, approached a student manager of the team, and said: “You know my son Joseph? Give him this (hands over a $100 bill – and we’re talking circa 1980 here) and tell him to go fuck himself!” Joe’s response upon receiving the gift and hearing the heartfelt sentiment? “Ooh, my dad pumps me up!”
That makes Gotti your great uncle. No such thing as a second uncle, however, I do think that makes the young Gottis on the show your second cousins.
A friend of the family’s worked in the steel mills and drove a limousine on the weekends. He was the driver for my prom. He had an Uzi under the driver’s seat. Yes, an Uzi. I still remember being at the family party where he was bragging and showing off his new purchase. I asked him why he needed an Uzi. He said he’d been in a couple of situations when cars tried to run his limo off the road so he felt he needed to carry one. Who was I to questions further?
Anyhow, they’ve since moved to Florida, and he’s since killed himself. I don’t know why, the rumor was something that he had some debts and was basically told “your family or you,” but who the heck knows. It’s not really a side of my family I know much about (these are relatives by my uncle’s marriage).
So, I assume he was most likely involved in something mob-like.
I’ve known several italians with “mob connections.” Some may have been just telling stories but I was over at a buddy’s place in Atlanta when someone knocked at his door, he went to answer it, then walked back through the living room with a paper bag package, heading for his room (to a safe I presume.) I never asked about it and he never volunteered anything more.
I never hung out at his place again.
– IG
A coworker of mine is friends with the brother of Anthony Spilotro. Joe Pesci’s character in Casino is based on Tony the Ant.
My first solo sales call was to a Las Vegas business owner who’s tied to the Chicago mob. I’d read his name on the front page of the Las Vegas Review Journal two days before I went to make the call. Nicest guy you’d ever want meet. Downright avuncular. (Not that I wasn’t shitting a brick when I was waiting to meet him, though.)
Oh, I should add that I briefly worked at a law office, where there were definitely Outfit (Chicago mafia) types or connections who came around. But that doesn’t really count, since they’re clients and not personal acquaintances or family.
A few years ago, we discovered the existence of an until then unknown member of our family, Cousin Eddie. I’m not sure of how precisely we’re related to him, but we call him Cousin Eddie. Eddie visited members of our family a few times, and we went to see him, including attending his daughter’s wedding, which was fabulous.
We have suspicions about Cousin Eddie…he told some stories that, if true, were rather troubling, and then, one time, my mom and sister were visiting him, and he offered to take them shopping. He took them to this athletic wear store and said, “take anything you want, the owner owes me money.” He then gestured to an extremely afraid looking man standing behind the counter, who nodded emphatically.
:eek:
Countless numbers. I once went on a tour around the House of Lords.
My grandfather was a lawyer who worked for a number of legitimate businessmen in Chicago.
I have a suspicion that a guy in my division has some underworld connections.
My uncle was a launderer for the “Dixie Mafia” (southeastern organized crime with some ties to the New Orleans mob but mostly run by homegrown non-Mediterranean ancestried folk) through a motel he managed. The restaurant/nightclub/lounge was one of the hottest in town and supposedly claimed to have cover-charges when in fact it never did, the meeting rooms were always full on the books whether they really were or not, and room service in the VIP rooms (those entered from the lobby and not visible from outside) included some gorgeous girls and $1000 minimum ante poker games. At a time when most motel managers were living middle class lives my uncle was driving top-of-the-line Caddies, paying off a house in the then “in” neighborhood in about 4 years, sending his wife on 1st class vacations every year, etc…
Outside of him I’ve known several people who like to pretend they have or had mob connections but invariably they are or were broke and on their ass, so if they do it’s to some peon footsoldier who’s a cousin-in-law twice removed and not exactly John Gotti. A guy who rented my grandmother’s (absolutely falling down) house was, I firmly believe, connected at one time with the Cuban mob (he himself was ancestrally Irish but his wife had been Cuban) and his common-law wife had been married and divorced from a [gay] Cuban mobster, but I think the reason they were in Alabama was because he had pissed them off (possibly from something as mundane as borrowing money and not paying it back) and they’d run for their lives. Again, he loved to talk big about “back when I could punch 7 numbers in a phone and get a guy clipped”, but in the next sentence he might beg to borrow “tree bucks to get to work tomorra”.
The exception was a (literally) crazy old Jewish guy I’ll call ‘Hi’ my mom b dated one time who chased her for a year or two afterwards and who once made a comment about how “yeah, my brother-in-law is kinda… well… connected y’know, so I might need to get him to go have a word with” an ex-boyfriend who had beaten up one of Hi’s grown daughters. We thought it was more of Hi’s bigshottery bullshittery until the news announced that the boyfriend (whose name we knew) had been shot (non-fatally) and beaten in an apparent mugging a couple of weeks later. We later learned his brother-in-law’s name and did some library research on him out of curiosity; he was a lawyer in New Orleans who had been indicted but never convicted for suspicion of involvement with the mafia there.
I hung out with a few Bloods when I was a kid. I used to hang out with an Italian who I am pretty sure was connected. I know I have been in the presence of CIA agents, but not known they were CIA agents at the time. I met a guy once who claimed he was a member of Al Qaida. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have met some Israeli or Russian mobsters, and I used to work in a recording studio that recorded a lot of Def Jam artists. I’ve known people plugged into psychedelic drug traderoutes in my travels on the road. A friend of my Dad’s a former Mayor of a medium sized city is being indicted on some fraud charges. My friend recently bought an old speakeasy that belonged to Mayer Lansky.
I guess it depends on how one defines organized crime.